Chapter 14
All marriages have their bad sides, because all people have weaknesses.
If you live with another human being you learn to handle these weaknesses in a variety of ways.
For instance, you might take the view that weaknesses are a bit like heavy pieces of furniture, and based on this you must learn to clean around them. To maintain the illusion.
Of course the dust is building up unseen, but you learn to repress this for as long as it goes unnoticed by guests.
And then one day someone moves a piece of furniture without your say-so, and everything comes into plain view.
Dirt and scratch marks. Permanent damage to the parquet floor. By then it’s too late.
Britt-Marie stands in the bathroom at the recreation center, looking at all of her worst sides in the mirror.
She’s afraid—she’s fairly certain this is her worst side.
More than anything she’d like to go home.
Iron Kent’s shirts and sit on her own balcony.
More than anything she’d like everything to go back to normal.
“Do you want me to leave?” asks Pirate anxiously from the doorway.
“I’m not going to tolerate your laughing at me,” says Britt-Marie with all the strictness she can summon.
“Why would I laugh at you?” asks Pirate.
She sucks in her cheeks without answering. Hesitant, he holds out a carton of cigarettes with foreign lettering.
“Sven said you forgot this.”
Britt-Marie takes it, dismayed. Contraband.
Which she has now either stolen or bought on credit, depending on how positively you want to look at it.
This is all highly vexatious, because Britt-Marie is not even sure now what sort of criminal she is.
But there’s no doubt that she’s a criminal.
Although Kent would certainly agree with Somebody that there’s nothing criminal about withholding cigarettes from the tax authorities and the police.
“Get over it, darling! It’s not cheating if you don’t get caught!
” he always used to say when she was signing off her tax return and she asked what all those other pieces of paper were that Kent’s accountant had slipped into the envelope.
“Don’t worry, they’re completely legal tax deductions!
Get on with it!” he’d say reassuringly. Kent loved deductions and loathed tax bills.
Britt-Marie never dared admit to him that she did not understand the rights and wrongs of it.
Pirate gently touches her shoulder.
“They weren’t laughing at you. In the pizzeria, I mean. They were laughing at Fredrik. He was the boss at the trucking company when they all got fired, so they don’t like him.”
Britt-Marie nods and tries to look as if, in fact, she hadn’t been especially worried about it in the first place. Pirate seems encouraged by this response, because he goes on:
“Fredrik trains the hockey team in town, they’re wicked!
The tall one who was with him in the pizzeria is his son, he’s as old as me but he’s almost got a beard already!
You get that? Sick, isn’t it? He’s wicked at soccer as well but Fredrik wants him to play hockey because he thinks hockey’s better! ”
“Why on earth does he think that?” asks Britt-Marie, because on the basis of her slight knowledge of hockey it seems to her one of the few things in the universe that is more ludicrous than soccer.
“Probably because it’s expensive. Fredrik likes things that most people can’t afford,” says Pirate.
“Why are you so dreadfully amused by soccer, then?” asks Britt-Marie.
Pirate seems to find the question mystifying.
“What do you mean? People like soccer just because they like soccer, that’s all.”
Ludicrous, thinks Britt-Marie, but she doesn’t say it. Instead, she points to a bag in the boy’s hand.
“What’s that?”
“Scissors and a comb and products and stuff!” says the boy blissfully.
Britt-Marie doesn’t ask what he means by “products” but she notes that he has a heck of a lot of jars, anyway. She fetches a stool from the kitchen, puts down towels on the floor, and gestures for him to take a seat. Then she washes his hair and cuts the uneven bits. She used to do that for Ingrid.
Suddenly words come tumbling out of her; she can’t understand why on earth she had to open her mouth, but:
“From time to time I feel unsure whether people are laughing at me or something else, you must understand. My husband says I don’t have a sense of humor.”
She is quickly silenced by her common sense. Embarrassed, she clamps her lips together.
The boy stares at her in the mirror with consternation.
“That’s a horrific thing to say to someone!”
Britt-Marie doesn’t answer. But she agrees. It is a horrific thing to say to someone.
“Do you love him? Your husband?” asks the boy so suddenly that Britt-Marie almost snips him in the ear.
She brushes down his shoulder with the back of her hand. Buries her gaze in his scalp.
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t he here, then?”
“Because sometimes love isn’t enough.”
Then they remain silent until Britt-Marie has finished cutting, and Pirate’s unruly mop has been tenderly coaxed into a hairstyle as neat as biological circumstances will allow.
He stays where he is, admiring himself in the mirror.
Britt-Marie cleans up and looks out into the parking area.
Two young men are standing there, neither of them even twenty years old, smoking and leaning against a big black car.
They’re wearing the same kind of jeans, ripped across the thighs, as the children in the soccer team.
But these two are no children. They look like the sort of young men who would make Britt-Marie take a firmer grip on her handbag while passing.
Not that she judges people, not at all, but one of these men actually has tattoos on his hands.
“That’s Sami and Psycho,” says Pirate behind her.
He sounds scared.
“Those are not names,” Britt-Marie informs him.
“Sami is a name, I think. But Psycho is called Psycho because he’s a psycho,” says Pirate quietly, as if he doesn’t dare utter their names too loudly.
“I don’t suppose they have jobs to go to?”
Pirate shrugs.
“No one here has a job. Apart from some really old people.”
Britt-Marie puts one hand in the other. Then the other in the one. While trying not to be offended.
“The one on the right has tattoos on his hands,” she notes.
“That’s Psycho. He’s mad. Sami’s quite all right, but Psycho’s . . . you know, he’s dangerous. You have to avoid any trouble with him. My mother says I’m not allowed in Vega and Omar’s house when Psycho’s there.”
“Why on earth would he be in Vega and Omar’s home?”
“Sami is their older brother.”
The door of the pizzeria opens. Vega emerges with two pizzas and hands them to Sami. He kisses her on the cheek. Psycho grins insolently at her. She looks at him as if she just bought a new bag and he vomited in it. Then he slams the door. The black car pulls out of the parking area.
“They don’t eat in the pizzeria when Sven’s there. Vega said they’re not allowed to,” explains Pirate.
“Ha. Quite understandable. Because she knows they’re worried about the police, of course.”
“No, because she knows the police are afraid of them.”
Societies are like people in that way. If you don’t ask too many questions and don’t shift any heavy furniture around, there’s no need to notice their worst sides.
Britt-Marie brushes down her skirt. Then she brushes Pirate’s sleeve.
She’d like to change the subject, and without further ado he helps her out:
“Has Vega asked you yet?”
“About what?” asks Britt-Marie.
“If you want to be our coach?”
“Absolutely not!”
Extremely offended, she cups one hand into the other and asks:
“Anyway, what does that mean?”
“I mean a trainer. We have to have one. There’s a challenge cup in town; you can only enter if you have a team with a coach.”
“A cup? Like a competition?”
“Like a cup.”
“In this weather? Outdoors? That’s ludicrous!”
“No, I mean it’s an indoor competition. In a sports center, in town,” says Pirate.
Britt-Marie is about to say a few choice words about the sort of people who like to kick balls around indoors when there’s a knock on the door.
A boy about the same age as Pirate is standing outside. Long-haired, one might also add.
“Ha?” says Britt-Marie.
“Is Ben, like, here?” asks the boy.
It seems fairly unclear what the meaning of “like” is in the construction of the sentence. As if the boy just asked, “Is Ben almost here?”
“Who?” says Britt-Marie.
“Ben? Or, like, what they call him in his team. Pirate?”
“Ha. Ha. Ha. He is here, but he’s occupied,” says Britt-Marie firmly and is about to close the door.
“With what, sort of thing?” asks the boy.
“He’s meeting someone. Or he has a date. Or whatever it’s called.”
“I know. With me!” says the boy with a frustrated groan.
Britt-Marie, who is not encumbered with any prejudice, puts one hand in the other and says:
“Ha.”
The boy is chewing gum. She dislikes that. It’s actually quite all right to dislike chewing gum, even if you are a person without any prejudices.
“It’s, like, epically lame saying ‘date,’ ” says the boy.
“It was Pir . . . it was Ben who said it. In my time we said ‘meeting,’ ” says Britt-Marie, defending herself.
“Also epically lame,” snorts the boy.
“What do you say, then?” asks Britt-Marie, just a touch critically.
“Nothing. Just ‘out,’ sort of thing,” says the boy.
“I have to ask you to wait here,” says Britt-Marie and firmly closes the door.
Pirate stands in the bathroom, fixing his hair. He starts jumping up and down on the spot when he sees her in the mirror.
“Is he here? Isn’t he fantastic?”
“He’s strikingly rude,” says Britt-Marie, but Pirate obviously can’t hear anything, because the sound of his jumping echoes quite a lot in the bathroom.
Britt-Marie takes a piece of toilet paper, carefully picks a hair off Pirate’s jumper and folds it into the toilet paper, then flushes it down the toilet.